Napoleon: A Biography

bedroom unannounced and sat on the bedside. After reading his
morning's correspondence, he gave her a pinch and, getting no response,
departed. When the same thing happened the next morning, Laure
locked her door and gave strict instructions to her maid that no one was
to be admitted. Next morning there was a rattling sound at her door,
fo llowed by animated conversation outside between Napoleon and her
maid, who repeated her mistress's orders. Thinking she had seen off the
persistent First Consul, Laure went back to bed but within minutes
Napoleon was again at her bedside; he had opened another door into the
room with a private key.
Since Laure Junot was a notorious liar, we might be inclined to suspect
that this story, where she emerged one up, was really a smokescreen to
conceal an actual infidelity with the Consul. But the next day Junot
himself returned to Malmaison and was able to testify to his master's
eccentric behaviour. His orders forbade him to be absent from Paris
overnight, but Laure persuaded him to stay with her. Next morning
Napoleon appeared as usual and was both surprised and irritated to find
Junot in bed with his wife. Junot, summoning what dignity he could,
asked Napoleon what he meant by bursting into his wife's bedroom;
Napoleon at first blustered and became angry, reminding Junot that he
could be punished for disobeying orders; finally he subsided and
insinuated that the temptress Laure was really to blame. It is not
recorded that he ever again tried to seduce her, though he did get his
revenge by revealing to Laure the details of the informal harem Junot
kept in Egypt.
A deep current of misogyny, almost certainly deriving from his early
experiences with Letizia and doubtless exacerbated by Josephine's
infidelities, underlay all Napoleon's dealings with women. Although he
liked to bed them, he had nothing but contempt for their values and
aspirations, and his behaviour suggests strongly the profile of a sexual
neurotic. With the normal male, heterosexual lust is usually tempered by
genuine admiration fo r the physical beauty of women, an appreciation of
their role as nurturers and comforters and some kind of sentimental
feelings of chivalry or protectiveness. With Napoleon there was only the
lust, and instead of the other qualities there was aggression and
resentment. Such men like to 'do the dirt' on women by cutting their
hair, throwing ink on their beautiful clothes, and so on. It is worth noting
that Napoleon often repeated his Pauline Foures trick of 'accidentally'
spilling coffee on a woman's dress; his later mistress Eleonore Denuelle
was one of the sufferers.
There were other examples of this neurotic aggression. When he first